Schools enjoy learning together
INVERARAY and Dalmally primary schools have been learning together this session.
Both P5-7 classes came together with Dalmally Historical Society, Inveraray History Society and friends and families at Inveraray on September 27 last year to hear a talk from Marga- ret Bennett about Eric Cregeen and his writings on droving and Highland life.
Eric documented crofting and droving by interviewing people as he travelled around the country.
Margaret noted the Manx language has similar pronunciation to Scottish Gaelic and therefore the interviewees could talk in their mother tongue and be understood by Eric. She also led a short workshop on gathering oral histories which the children will shortly be putting into practice. The visit was organised through Crofting Connections and funded by the Heritage Lottery Fund.
The same classes met together again at the end of January for Inveraray Burns Club’s annual recitation competition. P6 and P7 pupils were challenged to learn some of or all eight verses of Burns’s poem To a
Mouse which they recited in front of three judges from the club. The standard was high and the judges finally picked Sara Bakali, P6, and Ashley Lindsay MacDougal, P7, as the Inveraray winners and Corin Rider Anderson, P6, and Tina Bell, P7 as the Dalmally winners. Tina was also judged the best performance overall and was awarded a shield. Pupils enjoyed a mini Burns supper which ended with the singing of Auld Lang Syne.
Inveraray Burns Club also supported the visit of the P5-7 classes to the Robert Burns Birthplace Museum in Alloway at the end of February. The group visited the museum then took a walking tour, taking in the Burns monument and memorial gardens, hearing the tale of Tam O’Shanter and then re-enacting the part where Meg, Tam’s horse, loses her tail going over the Brig o' Doon.
When the group reached the mouse from To a Mouse, they stopped to recite the poem as they had in the competition a few weeks earlier.
The P5-7 classes came together again in March to visit another time in history, this time through storytelling and drama.
Victoria Beesley had been performing her short play My
Friend Selma about her friend who was a refugee from Bosnia in the 1990s. She used the props from the play to inspire the groups of pupils to write their own short stories and perform them.
The groups chose three of the props, decided where their story would be set and gave themselves a problem to solve during the story. They then storyboarded their play in six ‘pictures’ which became the still shots performed by the groups with narration.
Vicky ended the workshop by telling the children the story of her friend Selma and took questions about the story and the history of the time.
The schools will come together again in May for a Bodyworks science show and for a sports and arts day in June.